A Narrative Inquiry into International Students’ Learning Experiences in Sweden : From the Perspective of Existential Learning

Abstract: Study abroad has received much attention as an effective educational practice in today’s globalized world, and a wide range of skills, attitudes, and knowledge has been recognized as potential learning outcomes resulting from it. Accordingly, in the context of higher education, international students’ learning experiences have been understood in terms of measurable outcomes. Outcome-oriented understanding, however, has put international students’ learning experiences into a binary category of successful or failed learning experiences, based on whether they learned what they were supposed to learn during study abroad. This study takes a critical stance that binary understanding of student learning during study abroad fails to grasp the uniqueness and complexity of each international student’s learning experiences and aims to go beyond binaries to provide a more nuanced understanding of them. Through autobiographical narrative interviews, five students’ narratives about their learning experiences during study abroad were collected. The five students were graduate students studying in Sweden, which represent an under-researched group in the previous literature. Their narratives were comparatively analyzed using thematic narrative analysis, from the perspective of existential learning theory. The results demonstrated the uniqueness of the five international students’ learning experiences, by showing that they experienced existential learning with different dimensions of their existence and in different settings, including formal and informal settings. The results also highlighted the complexity of their learning processes, where each student sought to learn in a way in which the new values, beliefs, or knowledge that they encountered could be consistently integrated into their own biographies. This study shed new light on international students’ learning experiences, highlighting the uniqueness and complexity of them from the perspective of existential learning theory.